


what's a devil to do?

by AtlantisRises



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale is only in it spiritually, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Show-canon compliant, a bit of angst, and drunken chat, canon-typical abuse of alcohol let's say, in so much as an immortal ocult being can abuse alcohol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-05 21:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19048753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtlantisRises/pseuds/AtlantisRises
Summary: Anathema Device is four whiskeys deep when she cocks her head like a little bird and says “why?”****OR: Sometime after the End, a witch and a demon have a conversation





	what's a devil to do?

**Jasmine Cottage, sometime after the End:**

Anathema Device is four whiskeys deep when she cocks her head like a little bird and says “why?”

Crowley—who has kept pace with her mostly for the look of the thing, and because Aziraphale is off doing something fussy and bookish at an estate sale, and because the witch girl has half-decent taste in alcohol—tilts his head back until it touches the wall and says “why what?”

“Why help us? Why save the world?” she says, and then, when he rolls his head to the side and raises one dark eyebrow: “I saw you on that airstrip—”

“Clever of you.”

“— _you._ And the angel. You looked absolutely frantic about the whole thing. Why? Would they”—she wiggles her fingers at the ceiling and he can, at least, appreciate the complete lack of reverence in the gesture—"have killed you too?”

Crowley lolls his head a little more and lets his glass dangle loosely from the hand draped over his knee. He’s not even close to drunk, but it’s a look.

“If the Host had won, yeah, sure. I wasn’t planning to stick around and see.”

“But you did.”

“Eh,” he says. “It was that or Alpha Centauri, and the angel was being a tit about leaving.”

Anathema makes an _ah-ha!_ sort of face. “So you _did_ stay for Aziraphale. Funny, I never fancied you for a romantic.”

“Nor I you, witch girl.”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“And I’m…more than that. By six thousand years at least.”

Her eyes narrow and her lips purse. If the drink didn’t have her just a little bit off-center, and if her hair wasn’t falling in little wisps out of her bun and tickling her nose, Crowley reckons it would be a proper, hellish glower. The sort to cow mortal men and turn beasts from the door and yadda yadda yadda.  It’s not bad.

“The point…” she says.

“The point,” he says, “is sushi. And orchids, and bizarre designer sex toys and classic cars and…” he raises the glass to the light and peers up through the lovely deep amber of it. “Macallan, is it? Quite good.” He tips his glass to her and throws it back. “Yeahhh, that’s the stuff. You don’t get this in Hell, witch girl. You’d think, oh yeah, vice up the wazoo. Just an utter _Bacchanal_ of lust and gluttony and sloth and the rest, for all eternity.” He curls his lip and reaches for the bottle on the coffee table between them. “S’not. It’s mostly blood and paperwork.  Humans invented the Bacchanal.”

“Not Bacchus?”

“Humans invented Bacchus. Good idea all around, really.”

“I’ve heard his followers got naked and tore men to pieces.”

“And I’ve heard the same about witches. Rumor’s a powerful thing.” He grins a big sharp grin while he pours. “Now _that_ I may have had a hand in.”

“Great.”

“Not the nudity bit specifically, mind. Or the sexism. Or the gender thing at all, really. That was all your lot.”

She lifts a finger at that, opens her mouth, and then closes it, her brow creasing and her lips pursing.  “Huh,” she says.

“Indeed.”

He refills her glass and lets a gentle silence fall between them.

She breaks it.

“You did stay, though. You were _going to_ leave, whiskey and sex toys be damned. You just said so. But you stayed.”

He waves his hand as if to swat the whole train of thought out of the air. She goes on, undeterred:

“You really couldn’t leave him, could you?”

Crowley tilts his head back again, fast enough this time to bump it into the cottage wall. He takes off his sunglasses, blinks twice at the astrolabe hanging rather inexplicably from the ceiling, and puts them back on.

She waits.

“I thought he was dead,” he says, finally. “Real, _proper_ dead. Extinguished. Gone. His bookshop went up in flames and I thought, that’s it, they’ve taken him, he’s never coming back.”

“Who’s they?” she asks, voiced hushed in a way that the room suddenly seems to demand.

Crowley snorts. “My people. His people. Not much difference, in the end; maybe he was asking too many questions, maybe he was getting in the way. Maybe Gabriel finally decided having a principality cavort about feeding ducks with a demon was a bit of an embarrassment.”

“So…you came to Tadfield?”

“What? No. I got drunk.”

“Oh.”

“Seemed like the right thing to do. End of the world, right? why not spend it shitfaced in a gastropub.”

“But you were going to leave,” she says. She does the scrunched-up, confused-bird thing with her face again and throws her hands up on either side of her head. “If Aziraphale was what was keeping you on Earth and, and you thought he was _gone_ and staying could have been a _death_ _sentence_ then why not just….go?”

Crowley takes his glasses off again. The window behind Anathema is open, and he watches the breeze puff the curtains out like gauzy white balloons. He looks down at his drink, and at the bottle, and then at her.

She blinks.

“Oh,” she says. It hangs in the air between them.

He closes his eyes.

“You know, I didn’t realize,” she says. “That day you hit me with your car, after you dropped me off, you called him _angel_. It never would have occurred to me that he was _actually_ …I mean. I just thought. Well.” She folds one hand into the other. “It just seemed to fit. You and him.”

“Did it,” says Crowley into his drink. He puts his sunglasses back on.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the Harley Poe song of the same name, mostly because it's been stuck in my head all day and I needed to stop myself from using an angsty Placebo lyric.
> 
> Find me at Pactmagic on Tumblr <3


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